Matthew 25:1-13
Being Helpers
James Sledge November
12, 2023
You don’t have to look very hard at the
world to get discouraged. The situation in the Middle East is terrifying. The
atrocities committed by Hamas are beyond the pale, even for terrorists, and
Israel’s complete lack of regard for the lives of civilians is nearly as bad.
The number of women and children killed and maimed is appalling, and I don’t
see how Israel’s actions can avoid helping create a new generation of hatred
and even more terrorists.
Then right after I had begun to write this
sermon, we had yet another mass shooting using an assault style weapon. Will it
never end?
On a larger scale, I worry that we have
reached a point of no return on climate change. Recently in The Washington
Post, I’ve seen articles on how this year has shattered heat records, and how
the West Antarctic ice sheet faces unavoidable melting.
Speaking of which, the current state of
political affairs makes me fear for the future of democracy. The level of
political dysfunction and total demonization of opposing views is staggering.
Worldwide there has been a shift toward autocracy in many democratic nations,
and some would seem to prefer that for the US.
And why leave religion out of this sordid
mess? A precipitous decline in American church participation has only been
accelerated by Covid. Oldline denominations such as Presbyterians are shrinking
at a rate that we can’t possibly support all our affiliated seminaries, and I
wonder if our denominational structures themselves may be in jeopardy.
Add to that the damage done to the
Christian brand by fundamentalists who use faith as the driving force behind
all manner of hatreds. To make matters worse, a significant part of
conservative Christianity views Donald Trump as some sort of messianic figure,
a man who couldn’t get much further from the way of Jesus if he tried.
For these reasons
and more, it would be easy to become cynical and decide the situation is
hopeless. No doubt there are many who have given in to some sort of despair,
who’ve become numb to it all and just focus on what they can control in their
own lives and the lives of those closest to them.
Over 1900 years ago, the people of a small
church congregation were more than a little worried about the future. They were
mostly Jewish, and they followed Jesus as their Jewish Messiah. When the church
first started some years earlier there had been incredible hope for the future.
Most of them had believed that the risen Jesus would soon return and inaugurate
the messianic age where all would be set right. But it had now been over fifty
years since the first Easter. Most everyone who’d been around back then had
died, and still no Jesus.
To make matters worse, they were being
pushed out of the synagogue. They still considered it their spiritual home, but
the rabbis made it clear that Jesus followers were not welcome there.
Trouble with the rabbis had started after
Jerusalem and its magnificent Temple were destroyed fifteen of so years
earlier. The loss of the holy city and especially of the Temple was a terrible
blow to Jews, including Christian ones. Many of the Christians had thought
Jerusalem would be the epicenter of the new age the returning Jesus would usher
in. But that hope was now gone.
The destruction of Temple had pretty much
ended priestly Judaism, and rabbinical Judaism or the Pharisees had become the
dominant voice. As they consolidated their power, they begin to push Christian
Jews out. There was even some persecution of Christian Jews.
Lately there had been infighting within
the church itself. Some advocated abandoning Torah completely, but others
argued that Jesus has taught from the Torah. Lately the arguments had gotten
more intense, and some had been labeled false prophets and been kicked out of
the church.
The historic home of Judaism along with
the Temple destroyed and in ruins, being pushed out of the synagogue and
belittled for following Jesus, bickering and fighting in the church itself, and
growing doubts about Jesus’ return; the future looked uncertain, even grim for
this little church and the faith. No doubt many had begun to despair.
The author of our gospel was a member of
this church, and he has all these issues in mind when he sits down to write.
And as the gospel story moves closer and closer to the cross, Matthew has Jesus
speak to some of these concerns in his final teachings, sometimes labeled the
second Sermon on the Mount,
After Jesus points out how his return date
is unknown and will happen in a manner that is unanticipated, he tells four
last parables, the last parables of Jesus before his arrest. Each one
addresses, in some way, how believers are to handle the wait for his return.
This morning’s parable is the second of
these, and it addresses how people are to wait. The teaching ends with a charge
to “Keep awake,” but curiously both the wise and foolish
bridesmaids in the parable fall asleep. I take it that the command to keep
awake is a general admonition to live expectantly, but the parable speaks to
what that looks like.
In the parable, the only difference
between the wise and the foolish is that the wise bring extra oil. All go to
meet the bridegroom. All carry lamps. All are ready to attend the banquet. All
fall asleep. Yet when the foolish say “Lord, Lord,” to the groom, an allegorical
stand-in for Jesus, his response is, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.”
Interestingly, the first Sermon on the
Mount contains very similar language. Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me
‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the
will of my Father in heaven. And he says he will respond to such folks
with, “I never knew you, go away from me…”
So what is the
significance of the wise bridesmaids having oil with them? I think it is about
more than being prepared for a long wait. The oil is symbolic. New Testament
scholar Eugene Boring notes that in Jewish tradition, oil is used to symbolize
both good deeds and Torah. He writes, “The oil,
or rather having oil, represents
what will count in the parousia: deeds of love and mercy in obedience to the
Great Commandment… Here, Matthew pictures preparation for the parousia as
responsible deeds of discipleship, not constant ‘watching’ for the end.”[1]
In times when the future is uncertain and
even a little scary, I think Christian faith offers some good advice. It says
that no matter how things appear, the future belongs to God. When Martin Luther
King, Jr. said that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, he
wasn’t expressing his hope in a human capacity to make things better. He was
saying that the moral arc is safely in God’s hands.
But we are not called simply to wait for
God to do something. We have work to do. In this parable and the ones that
follow, Jesus makes clear that we are to engage in acts of love and mercy and
to care for “the least of these.” We are to show the world what God’s love
looks like in action, and in so doing, demonstrate a hopeful vision for the
future.
Many of you are familiar with the famous
quote from Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers fame. He says, "My mother would say
to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To
this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I
am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many
caring people in this world."
Jesus says that our job in uncertain times
is not to sit around waiting for his return or worrying about when it might
happen. Our job is to be helpers, to be agents of love and care whose lives
give others comfort and hope, whose lives give the world a glimpse of what God’s
future will be.
[1] M.
Eugene Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew: Introduction, Commentary, and
Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 8, ed. L. E. Keck et al.
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 450.
No comments:
Post a Comment